The Shortest Day Of The Year

It's that time of year again - Daylight Savings Time begins tonight - set your clocks ahead at 2:00 a.m. (or whatever time you do it). Oh, joy.

I really hate this one. Losing an hour screws me up for weeks. I never could really figure that out. If you set the clocks ahead right before you go to bed, then sleep through the night, wake up in the morning, see what time it is and go from there - why should the loss of one hour be so difficult? It's only one hour. I don't know why - but it is. I feel like I'm all off kilter for days and days after this change. For some reason, the fall time change doesn't effect me as badly. (Maybe it's just the idea of getting an extra hour in the day, makes it less of a trauma).

Some people suggest it has to do with a disruption of one's circadian rhythm. I suppose that's possible, although we don't really live by the cycles of sunlight and darkness anymore, but by these self-imposed, 'fake' delineations of morning, afternoon, and evening that we've created.

And the spring DST adjustment makes Sunday only 23 hours long, which is why it is truly the shortest day of the year.

Some useless trivia:

• Daylight Savings Time was originally proposed by an English builder and outdoorsman named William Willett, in part because he liked to play golf and didn't like having to end his game so early in the summertime.
• Benjamin Franklin did not propose DST, although while in France he did anonymously publish a letter encouraging people to rise earlier in the morning nearer to sunrise, to take advantage of natural light and save on candles in the evening (hence the phrase "early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise")
• The United States first adopted Daylight Savings Time 1918
• Parts of Indiana did not adjust for DST for many years, but in 2006 changed that practice, and now the entire state does observe DST
• Arizona, however, does not (unless you're on the Navajo Reservation, where they do). Hawaii is the only other state not to observe DST

All useless trivia courtesy of Wikipedia (a decidedly not useless nor trivial site; I love Wikipedia; you can find the answer to just about anything there, and if you can't, well - you can write your own answer!)